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Beijing’s Struggle to Keep People in Their Place

A farmer removes old plants to sow broad beans at a village near a new residential compound in Hefei, Anhui province, November 13, 2013.

Reuters

China’s Communist Party has a message for the country’s put-upon rural residents: Don’t come to us, we’ll come to you.

Earlier this week, Beijing announced new regulations banning citizens from petitioning outside their home provinces – essentially an effort to keep the country’s poor and disgruntled from bringing their grievances to the capital.

At the same time, the Party is insisting that more of its members meet people where they live, employing “pocket cadres” whose mission is to, as the People’s Daily put it, “go the last mile, [and] have a more direct relationship with the masses.”

Chinese leaders have tried to keep aggrieved rural residents in their place before, with little success. The effort to reach out to them through this new campaign appears to be an acknowledgement of past failures. But it also betrays a nostalgia for political ideas that seem out of step with some of the major realities of the moment.

The purpose of the “pocket cadre” campaign — which has been taking place primarily in China’s countryside — is two-fold: to listen more to the complaints of residents in various regions “by going face-to-face, through home visits to hear their voices”; and to educate the masses about what the Party is already accomplishing on their behalf.

That way, Beijing believes, Party representative will be then “better able to do practical things for the people, problem-solving things.”

The “pocket” part of the strategy, according to Xinhua, refers to satchels that cadres carry on these missions to “collect suggestions from villagers” and to cart in needed items such as salt and medicine to outlying areas that residents have requested.

These officials also often carry a “pocket-sized book”– which is “small in size, convenient to take along, and which can be used to commit to memory and allow Party members to convey current policies in a format that the masses can grasp easily.”

By making these treks into villages, the Party displays an interest in the daily lives of rural inhabitants, and pushes officials to play a role in resolving local disputes — while also pinpointing potential sources of discontent before they emerge.

The upside of this initiative is not inconsiderable. Rural residents appear to appreciate the concern shown by cadres, and have come to rely on both their visits and the appearance of “demand boxes” that enable citizens to identify specific complaints but have them acted on locally.

Party representatives also have to be pleased that people who might otherwise petition higher levels for redress have a new avenue for seeking out officials to help solve their problems.

Finally, there’s the chance that this experiment, which is largely targeted on the Chinese countryside, could be employed elsewhere in the country, and provide a precursor for greater political dialogue in the society.

At the same time, there’s something almost retrograde about this campaign.

It’s not only that the outreach to the rural areas is reminiscent of the Communist party’s effort decades ago to bring better medical care to the countryside by using “barefoot doctors.” It’s also that these new “barefoot officials” seem out of step with Beijing’s strategy for economic development, which aims to have about 60% of its population living in cities by 2020.

It’s difficult to see how addressing unhappiness in the nation’s countryside represents a crucial step forward when the expectations of the Chinese leadership are that the major economic forces will soon be centered in Chinese cities.

A steady stream of urban conflicts suggest that the biggest challenge to the Party’s relevancy does not come from angry farmers, but rather frustrations and discontent in cities increasingly swollen with those who’ve already given up on the countryside. In just the most recent of those conflicts, a mid-sized town in Zhejiang province was roiled by violence after members of the urban pari-police reportedly beat a street vendor then attacked an onlooker who was filming them.

The problem may well be political, reflecting different priorities among the country’s top two leaders: President Xi Jinping has continuously pushed the notion strengthening the Party is the most crucial task if the country is the move forward, while Premier Li Keqiang has put the priority on reforming China’s economy, in part through urbanization.

The use of “pocket cadres” to keep people happy and in their place is in keeping with Xi’s other efforts to address the fissures opening up in China’s increasingly mobile society. Li, meanwhile, has been much more interested in getting more income into the pockets of farmers by pulling them into the cities.

While debate in China about reform is healthy in the long run, the fact that there are these differences in the political leadership doesn’t bode well for Beijing in the short term. Until that argument is resolved, promising experiments such as “pocket cadres” are likely to come and go without ever knowing the way home.

Russell Leigh Moses is the Dean of Academics and Faculty at The Beijing Center for Chinese Studies. He is writing a book on the changing role of power in the Chinese political system.